Luke Costa lost his third straight fight in the Big Show
after getting his orbital broken in the first round and having his eye swell up
like a water balloon before the ref finally stopped it in the third. The Big
Show cut him, because that’s what they do after three in a row, and Luke
decided he’d had enough anyway. He said he was retiring, then planned a big
retirement party the following Friday night down at the Silver Sands. I got there
right on time and everybody was already drunk.

“How did this happen?” I asked John
Sands, who I found standing alone on the sidewalk outside the bar, squinting
down at his cell phone.

His shirt was all the way unbuttoned and the remnants of
what was either Mexican food or vomit stained his collar.

“Just, hey, I’m trying to concentrate
here,” he said.

“The email I got said seven,” I told
him. “It’s like 7:05 now.”

“This girl,” Sands said into his own
chest. “This amazing girl just gave me her number. I got to put it in my phone
before I forget it. God, she was fucking amazing, man.”

I looked around and all I saw were two
gutterpunks sitting in the doorway of a closed hair salon, punching away at a
little toy piano and singing Pearl Jam songs in a useless plea for spare
change. Past them was the ice cream shop, then another bar, then the churning
gray mass of the Pacific. It was winter and the beaches were empty. Even the
bums had moved in out of the wind. The gutterpunks finished up that one song
about still being alive and Sands tried to applaud but with his cell phone in
his hand it didn’t work. I asked Sands how long he’d been here and he gave me a
wounded look.

“Why? Where was I supposed to be?” he
said.

“I thought the party didn’t start until
right now,” I said. “Were you guys all drinking somewhere before this?”

“Look at this,” said Sands, holding out
his cellphone. “I’m trying to text this girl and it says the message won’t go
through. Am I typing the right number?”

“How should I know?” I said.

“Just look at it,” said Sands. “Tell me if it looks like
a real phone number to you.”

I pushed my way into the bar, wading
through a thick cloud of people all talking in too loud voices. Everybody was
there. People I hadn’t seen in months. People I’d assumed had moved away or
been put in jail or simply stopped existing. They were all back from the dead,
smiling at one another like they were all in on a secret together. They had the
easy comfort of people who had made themselves at home hours ago.

Luke Costa was at a booth in the back,
surrounded by empty glasses and women I didn’t know. His eye was still an
enormous, unseeing bulb hanging off his face. He seemed at peace with it. I
walked over to his table and tried to say something about the email I’d gotten.
It said seven. I was positive that it said seven. Luke nodded like he hadn’t
heard me at all and then handed me a half-empty drink.

“That’s for you,” he said over the
noise.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Fuck you what is it,” he said. “Drink
it and get us some more.”

A gorgeous blonde watched me with a
bored expression as I gulped it down. It tasted like someone might have put a
cigarette out in it, but I couldn’t be sure. Only when I turned to the bar for
a refill did I realize that I still had no idea what to ask for. I decided to
keep it simple and just get us two whiskeys, reasoning that if Luke didn’t want
one I could justify drinking both and, in this way, I might catch up with the
party at an all-out sprint. Then everything would be fine, I told myself. Then
the party start time thing would be a comical misunderstanding.

As I was trying to get the bartender’s
attention Brick elbowed his way in next to me. A girl in a tiger shirt complained
that he’d made her spill her drink and Brick suggested that she go ahead and
make a huge fucking deal about it. She went away, presumably to find a
boyfriend who would only remain interested in taking action until he saw that
Brick was the source of the insult.

“You believe this bullshit?” Brick said
into my ear as we huddled against the bar.

“No kidding,” I said. “Tell me the party
starts at seven, I’m going to show up at seven.”

Brick flashed a blank look. We stared at
each other like two men stranded on nearby islands, unsure whether it was worth
it to try and swim across just to be stranded with someone else.

I tried to explain that he was only retiring from
fighting, not from working or from life in general. Brick made a face and stuck
out his jaw a big, dull thing that had been thumped on by enemies and friends
alike. His great strength was in not caring who hit him or why. He never seemed
to think anyone needed a reason.

“Point is,” Brick said, “what’s he going to do? Bounce at
a strip club for the rest of his life?”

“Luke?” I said. He has a college
degree.”

“Sure he does,” said Brick. “You know
what his degree is in?”

I did
not. Truthfully, I didn’t even know for sure that he had one. All I knew was
that Costa had attended college somewhere, at some point, for some undetermined
length of time. It’s possible he had also wrestled there. You could say this
about all the guys at our gym and be right at least half the time.

“Sociology,” Brick said. “Motherfucker
has a degree in sociology. Look at him, you think he’s going to go be a
sociologist any time soon?”

I looked at him, Costa the cyclops. At
that very moment he was moving his lips into the blonde girl’s hair, which even
from across the crowded bar looked like it probably smelled wonderful. Her lips
moved and she laughed. I was filled with a terrible longing. None of this made
any sense. I didn’t even like these people half the time. What did I care about
being invited to their parties? What did I care about being liked by them?

But Costa breathing his stale all-day-drinking breath on
the beautiful girl’s face, still making her laugh, somehow, I couldn’t
understand it. I wanted whatever he had and I knew I wouldn’t get it. I wanted
no man alive to have anything that I did not have more of, and I recognized
right away what a stupid feeling that was.

“What time did you get here?” I asked
Brick.

“I don’t even know what time it is now,”
he said, “so I couldn’t tell you.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said.

“We were talking about something here,” Brick said. “I
was talking about something that mattered.”

The bartender came around and I paid for
the whiskeys. Brick took one of them without asking as soon as she set them
down. He drained half of it in one sip and then told me that the point was you
didn’t just fucking quit because you lost one fight.

“He lost three,” I said.

“Regardless,” Brick said.

“In a row,” I said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Brick said. “You
could lose ten in a row. If you quit just because you’re losing, all it means
is that you were bullshit from the start.”

Costa glanced over at us and made a
drinking motion with his empty hand, then pointed to the hand’s emptiness with
a quizzical gesture. I pointed at the whiskey in Brick’s hand. The meaning was
lost on everyone but me.

“It’s his life,” I told Brick. “If he
wants to do something else, let him do something else. What’s it to you?”

Brick winced and laughed a bitter,
joyless laugh. He told me it drove him crazy that I could be such a good
fighter while missing the point so thoroughly and consistently. I tried not to
show how happy this made me.

“You quit when you can’t lift your arms
up anymore,” Brick said in the general direction of Costa, who gave no
indication that he’d heard. Brick raised his voice.

“You quit when nobody will pay one more goddamn cent to
see you,” he said.

Costa looked over, turning his face so that his one
working eye was put to use.

“You quit when it’s the only choice you have left,” Brick
said.

I elbowed him in the side and he didn’t
seem to notice. He raised his glass to Costa, who was paying complete attention
now.